About Me

D.S. is an IT specialist, a mainstream occupation for a SF fan. He was caught several times in the fourth grade reading 1950's young adult SF novels inside his textbooks during class. Several thousand books and stories later he is still convinced that SF is the only true literature of ideas around.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Frank Herbert's Dune series

Yesterday I read a short story entitled Treasure in the Sand, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Brian Herbert is Frank Herbert's son, continuing the franchise with wordsmith Anderson. The piece is a corner tale, about a priest of Dune's religion coming back to the long-dead planet to find treasure.The Dune Series

Herbert's Dune novels are about as complex as books can be without completely losing the reader. You can get sucked in by them just through the accomplishment of understanding some of where they are going. The influence was tremendous. Really I don't have much to add--except that I wish I'd been older when I read them, or raised UU, or some such. I read them as a teenager and persevered through references I couldn't understand or figure out how to look up (Zensunni? WTF?). I read several of the novels before finally wearing out on the series, but I deeply sympathized with Paul Muad'dib.